Toronto, Ontario, Canada

We don’t use all our consonants, but we don’t sound American :)

Mijnheer – I grew up in the Atlanta area and I don’t even substitute “d” for “t” – “A’lanna” is closer to what I say. I tend to be more crisp about other words, but I struggle to say “Atlanta” as written.

Based on my parents’ recognition, I’d say that there are a few distinctions: ‘Bugs Bunny’, ‘Foghorn Leghorn’, ‘Yosemite Sam’, and ‘None of the above’, based upon exposure to film and television. That’s to say, they can tell a New Yorker from a Deep Southerner from a Cowboy Westerner, but throw them a Minnesotan or a Kentuckian or a Californian or a Canadian and they’ll file it under ‘Unidentified American’.

The KU audio database is a really good resource, in part because of standard texts that are designed to accentuate the idiosyncracies of, um, accents.

As for my accent (like those of the general locale) it seems to be one of the least subject to attrition, given the number of people who seem to have retained most of theirs after several decades living in the US. An inexact example is Ridley Scott, whose accent is noticeably thicker now than it was in the 1980s.

(One thing that has changed for me: Radio 4 play “Americans” now sound like fingernails across a blackboard.)

Interestingly, according to Desley Deacon, in a chapter you can read online (http://epress.anu.edu.au/tal/html/frames.php), there was a strong Australian influence on the development of what the movies promoted as a ‘good’ American accent.

Understanding accents different from your own is an acquired skill, and often taken for granted. Typically, those lacking interaction with diverse groups have a lot of difficulty understanding linguistic patterns different from their own. I am sure you can recall an instance when you have witnessed a misunderstanding between a local and an outsider who speaks lightly accented English.

For what it’s worth my midwestern relatives, perhaps due to the great-whatever mother from Rochedale, use words in everyday speech that are glossed as regional or archaic in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell.

George: So you would be okay with ‘nookyular’, I guess.
Yes. It’s a useful social marker.

Bruce: accents in English can be a matter of degree of intensity.
Intensity relative to what? This idea is like imagining you can stand at the still centre of the universe and watch everything else moving from your point of absolute rest and authority. You really mean “degree of difference from your own.”

novakant: in England …many reasonable people who want to be more widely and easily understood have adopted something sounding quite similar to the way people talk in Iowa
No. The standard British accent is now a general sort of Estuarian, closest in tone to North London. Amy Winehouse is trying to move this more towards Crunk Rapper, but so far with liu succe.

IME many Americans find it very, very difficult to distinguish NI and Scottish accents.

These can’t both be true, since many Americans consider the Scottish accent to be somewhere between comical (think of Groundskeeper Willie: “The noozel! The noozel at the end of the hoose!”) and incomprehensible (think of Mel Gibson’s American rooster in Chicken Run asking if the Scottish hen was in fact speaking English). These are exaggerations, of course, but I did watch Trainspotting on DVD with the captions turned on.

I could never understand half of what Benny Hill was saying, either, but I guess he often had his face planted in some woman’s chest as he talked.

But, to add my own amusing anecdote, on a trip to the States a couple of years ago, I did smile when I heard the very-proper CNN newsreader/anchor carefully enunciate the rap-person Fifty-cent’s name as “fiddy-cent”… A sweet gesture of cross-ethnic solidarity, I thought.